g1(host) is a serial, multi-media performance and site of study. An unfolding of the term “ghost,” it grapples with what it means to live within conditions shaped by the “afterlife” of slavery, described by scholar Saidiya Hartman as “skewed life chances… premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” In this project, I begin to unpack my fears about living side-by-side with this terror. I pursue questions regarding my body's status as it pivots on this fundamental query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?
- nia love

g1(host) : lostatsea 10, Gibney Dance, NY, NY. 2019

Benin Ford
In looking to locate a starting point to situate us in the broader structure and configuration of the project I can't help but recall this amazing moment in the talk-back to your most recent performance, g1 (host):lostatsea 10, when from the front row your mother told her own sort of water story about your childhood. It was so cool because she, you know, she called you a polliwog. And she said that you couldn't, or wouldn’t, get out of the water. You had a thing for the water and she recalled this moment where you had plunged in and someone was yelling “go go go.” It was striking because in this project you've taken up questions of water in relation to what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery,” raising questions of the Middle Passage, or what we might call, with a host of others, the black history of the sea. And maybe we can begin with reflecting on these memories of swimming and play and family life and this aquatic culture, and start to tease out the linkages of this early experience with the legacies of the Middle Passage that you’re attempting to approach in this project.

nia love
I think that's a great place to start, with some personal memories that situate themselves inside the body. Sometimes really consciously, particularly with this project and maybe unconsciously in the acts of my childhood play, I find myself marked by water, or maybe I should say I am watermarked. So as I tend to grow work, this work in particular, I’m finding that the place to locate myself in the practice and the process is in the very personal space. RE/membering moments that hold me in time and activate, still, all my sensory sensibilities. My childhood home where I spent most of my days working hard at playing. It was the pl/space where I could seriously access my imagination and slip through a slit between the pool wall into the sea. My grandfather, Winfield Scott Chapman III–a very proud Baton Rougeian born in 1909–was clear about the importance of liberation and liberatory action. He smiled deeply when I caught him watching me in my play time/space and he wanted us kids to have a pool, a place to swim and where we could play unrestricted, in a safe space–home. I don't ever really remember my grandparents restricting our playtime to time slots even in the face of homework. All my friends in the neighborhood could come and ring the doorbell and freely come in. I got to see my parents and grands working hard at play, and swimming was the locator of fun and rest; yeah from the beginning I knew what was home, what it looked like, smelled like, felt like.

One of the first intimate memories of water was being plunged into the pool by my father, which really was a happy experience of flight and floatation. I remember the wind across my face as he lifted me gently in the air and tossed me into the pool. I remember the water was soft and caressed me, took me into a downwards sink and brought me right back up to the surface before I had an opportunity to recognize the displacement. My body just responded in kind to the new element like I morphed into a frog and just started kicking and gliding across the surface. I remember hearing my father calling out from the side of the pool assuring me that this was something I have always known: you got this, kick, kick, kick. I’m not sure if he really said that to me, but it was certainly telepathic—yeah, yeah, yeah–it was! I guess my mother was right: I was and still am like a pollywog, swimming in this kind of frog-like motion that I think infants use with their ability to be both aquatic and terrestrial at the same time. I never wanted to get out of that space, that thinking about nonbinary s/place. The water was/is also a home within a home for me, a certain kind of calling from a deeper aquatic space. I spent hours outside along the edges of the pool in my backyard, I could at will call on and turn into Mami Wata spirit and other mermaid sensibilities. I could imagine: legs by day and gills/fins by night. It’s this kind of playful energy that moves us in and along the long deep plunge where monsters and demons are intimate and daunting and often cause us to lose our home base, the space and place that yields our profound power in any element.

I became a swim instructor and lifeguard at 16 years old. I started to share in my skills around water and offered some care and a different relationship with water to others who might have some trepidation or fears. I don’t think I have ever lived my life in a place where I was landlocked. I have always been a part of some kind of coastal geography. Now 2020 marks me with 27 year of living on an island, New York City.

g1(host) : lostatsea 4, Theater for the New City, NY, NY. 2017 — g1(*host) : lostatsea 4*, Theater for the New City, NY, NY. 2017

BF
It's interesting to hear you say that you were a swimming instructor, which I hadn't quite known although I suspected it. And it's interesting in light of a moment in this most recent performance, lostatsea, where Iquo Essien performs this water story about a childhood moment, which in some way your mother's story during the talk-back was a response to. Iquo talks about an experience with a swimming instructor named Ms. Camodine, a white woman who lived in a northeastern suburb with a backyard pool who Iquo and her sister took swimming lessons from. And at some point this teacher tells them that black people don't float or they can't float, and it sort of triggers this kind of long historical memory of the trauma of the Middle Passage and a sense of a recoil from water and waterscapes and the ocean and submergence. There's this deep conflict here because on the one hand your mother's story, in extension of the performance, where she's describing this, you know, diametrically opposed scene where there's this joy in the flesh, we might say, and this intense sort of feeling for the water, this feeling for children in their capacity to navigate this medium, “there's my polliwog,” and then you get this brutal sort of moment of Ms. Camodine saying that black people can't float, like they’re stones or something, you know, operating within some sort of different material state. And this incapacity vis-à-vis this particular medium speaks to a certain kind of assertion of incapacity broadly speaking regarding black flesh, black technical capacity in general.

nl
Yeah, it's this ongoing study of underwaterness that investigates how Trauma and Alchemy, you know, partner at least by way of mediation or meditation on this project g1 (host) , and my mother kind of brings that out in a way that I hadn't thought about. But as I look back at my memories of water and try to locate possible strands of alchemy in the process of this huge looming danger, remaking, if you will, a kind of Blackness and a kind of partnering somehow through my meditation on this kind of representation of memory that doesn't just get bookended by the trauma but expands the power of blackness and the ability to dwell on the outside while under and below deck–the inside: the remaking of and queering of space and being two things and three if we want.

BF
Yeah, yeah. I know one place where the project’s research has landed most recently is the awareness that Atlantic Africans, Africans caught up in the slave trade, were incredible swimmers. They had, one might say, a superlative affinity for water. They were incredible divers. They surfed. It turns out that the first written account of surfing took place off the Gold Coast. Wild, right?! And they bore these aquatic techniques to the New World where they were exploited in all kinds of ways since Europeans for the most part couldn’t swim and were terrified of submergence. It’s been said that the very idea of Western seafaring has no sense for the sea. And we've internalized this sense that like, yeah, we don't fuck with water. This felt, sort of transmitted idea that we got this thing with water precisely because of what Hartman calls the “breach of the Atlantic,” the Middle Passage, and we bear this historical aversion to water. And yet we learn that the Africans who were caught up actually had this profound feeling for water which was sustained in a number of ways in the New World. And so this notion of recoil from the terror of this medium through which modernity surfaces, which we were underneath, as you say, is a very complex thing that I think the project in general and this recent performance at Gibney especially takes up. I just remember you telling me, saying to me that you were a “water person.” This is something you understood.

g1(host):lostatsea 5, NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NY, NY. 2017 — g1(host):lostatsea 5, NYU Skirball *Center for the Performing Arts*, NY, NY. 2017

nl
I think it’s that idea, that memory however it surfaced–I'm a water person–that allowed me to really take the literal and figurative dive into the transatlantic slave journey by way of this project, you know, so acquiring my deep sea diving license two years ago was not something far-fetched for me. It was like where I need to be right now at this time and a result of that ongoing urge to move me into my water self as just a part of the faith. I started thinking about ways to investigate these untold stories of lives lost at sea and over the course of the next couple of years I began to film my dives, film myself in hopes of recovering or scavenging 600 years of debris of a catastrophic wreckage... or the collection of debris from my father's ashes spread out to sea in the Gulf of Mexico–all that shit that marks me with the task locating this project. That's far more complicated than just reaching down under and finding something tangible.

BF
There's a lot there. Because we're talking about these affinities for water, and at the same time there is the breach, the rupture which the Middle Passage was and continues to be, this incalculable breach. And given your affinity for water and your long-standing choreographic and life practice of contending with the afterlife of slavery, you still had to come to a place where you said, “I have to go down. I have to go in, into the sea, the ocean. I've got to descend.” You had to go there.

So you went through the process of obtaining deep sea diving certification and I remember talking to you after that process and you were preparing to go to Tobago to do dives and to film, but you didn't know what was about to happen, there was no particular choreographic objective or object you were after, you surely weren’t looking to dance in any normative sense. We talked afterwards and you were relaying the multiple difficulties of the process, one of which was the fact that the person shooting the footage (Orion Gordon) was looking to produce a storyboard to guide the camerawork and you couldn’t proceed along the lines of such a narrativizing approach. Your approach was much more speculative. You had to go down and feel, feel it out.

nl
Yeah two things; the “afterlife of slavery” marks me and with this mark I push myself to look upon the dead, dwell there at the threshold and not turn away in fear or inconsolable sadness or grief. To take the plunge deeply, to go down and see. The first task for my certification was two 40 foot dives with the dive master and five other dive cohorts. I remember the second 40 foot dive, putting the rig in my mouth and about to make that descent, looking at the land, and the water moving slowly over my face across my mask, and witnessing the land literally turn into water–like magic. Just like that I changed my orientation to the environment. I had to enter into this kind of soft space, this underwater space has a seemingly loosened sense of gravity. There is an effect on the body, a kind of suspension that appears to pause and then riffs sideways and downwards. I can't be too heavy in thought or my body would react and stiffen my experience and cause me to want to cling to that which wouldn’t serve me in this new environment. That doesn't mean that the accumulated truths I learned or experienced in my body on land were not valid, but it was a new kind of reckoning with consciousness. My speculation under water doesn't anchor itself in the knowledge that I've had before the descending, you know, and so how could I script that? How could I know any of this unless I took the dive from this place of creative, intuitive, unknowing space. I definitely was handing myself over to a broader spectrum of consciousness and I had to be willing to see whatever was to be seen and know that that would be a revelation. I also trusted that I would ascend with something so powerful and clear even if it appeared to be inarticulable; at some point the knowledge would adhere itself to my body and not my mouth–I believed that.

So the tangibility of this dive experience registers as a recalculation or reconstitution of another part of me. Maybe I am not me as I knew me before the descent and that through this middle passage or rather this passage into the middle I am combined with sulfur, oxygen, phosphorus and lime deposits that re-mark me in another way, bringing me to the door of no return–beyond the birth canal.

BF
One thing that’s apparent in these remarks is the intensity of your engagement with the field of black feminist studies and poetics. In particular the scholarly work of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe and others, as well as the poetic and critical work of Dionne Brand.

In her amazing book, Lose Your Mother, Hartman speaks of her own transatlantic engagements with slavery. She names her intentions to excavate the wound, the rupture of the trade in black flesh; she states that she wasn’t seeking the ancestral village but the barracoon, the dungeon. And yet she submits that her own training hadn’t prepared her to generate statements regarding those who left no records–scarcely any traces, bare remnants–outside the recordings of the terror they confronted. She asks how can a story be told about “an encounter with nothing.”

g1(host):lostatsea 6, Movement Research at Judson Church, NY, NY. 2017

nl
Yes, how does one know what to look for or find a thing when it isn’t registering as something you know. I’m gathering tools that allow me to figuratively float between my intuition and given historical data as a choreographic and directional compass in order to find the production of nothing. So I have chosen to experiment with a multitude of ideas. Ideas like: the time of day, the wetness of the water, the look of land slipping into the water, the surface of the water breaking from the weight of a thrown body. All of these ideas as both a development of a choreographic phrase and a view of the slit between time that passes and is not past, an on-going act that registers in a wayward fashion, leading to a speculation of movement literally, figuratively and historically. These aquatic and even atmospheric journeys yield a visual and sonic archive, you know, files of a sort that examine motion and gesture as tenants of what Hartman calls “critical fabulation.”

I remember telling you about this bubble that came out of my mouth while I was still holding my rig in my mouth–a slippage of air that burst right in front of me instead of dispersing 40 ft up at the surface. From this burst bubble, I saw an oily residue. I remember looking at the residue and seeing it leave behind a foggy rainbow. I couldn't believe the formation it took on in front of me; it had a life of its own, a dance that appeared and disappeared in seconds but shifted my state of consciousness and time. Wow! I can't even begin to compartmentalize it–it would flatten the power of its fantasy. Now I am hooked: what else is there for me to see, to witness?

BF
I’m totally fascinated with your encounter with this bubble, this little membrane, an elemental fold of gas and liquid, the afterlife of breath. To my mind this raises these questions of the elemental and the question of the possibility of speaking of a black elemental aesthetics. Of nothing, perhaps. The way that, like the bubble, you seem to be fashioning or fabricating or fabulating yourself as a strange kind of membrane, an assemblage with special capacities to sense things, to register things beyond grasp.

This takes us to other places in the field of black feminist investigation. While Hartman’s is largely a terrestrial or terran articulation, another partner in your move to the water has been Christina Sharpe, and her concept of the “wake” of transatlantic slavery, the ocean figured, or perhaps transfigured, as wake. Sharpe’s concepts and metaphors are crucially elemental: concerned with water, and air, hydrosphere and atmosphere. One set of definitions she offers of the wake is: “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow...”

nl
The many definitions of “wake” that Christina Sharpe offers us in her groundbreaking book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, anchor a deeper kind of commitment to the all-now concept of time, and reconfigures our commitment to sensing the systemic structures that silenced blackness in the archive. Like taking up the conversation with her idea of “residence time:” the time it takes for elements to cycle out of the ocean, like 260 million years for sodium, right? Beyond this truth of science and ecology there is this kind of cascading symbolism of redemptive quality that the ecosystem is naturally composed of. Allowing us time to reflect, gather and defend if necessary, truths from our time spent here on the planet. So “residence time” marks time beyond us, you know, takes up this kind of bonding with substances that enter into the atmosphere and into the ocean and then leave the ocean–sedimentation that in turn educates the galaxy.

BF
The wake as elemental disturbance. I can’t help but think here, with and perhaps in extension of Sharpe, of blackness and the sense that a part of the situation of black “being in the wake,” as she puts it, is that blackness constitutes such a disturbance, an elemental disturbance of the flows of modernity, its traffic, its ships. That it operates as this ghosted element. If wake work is, in part, elemental, then it’s this work of disturbance: wake work is about producing wakes, movement in and of atmosphere, in and of elements, disturbing flow in the interest of other “motionalities,” as you’ve said before. g1(host) as wake work is about making different kinds of wakes in different elemental media: you go to the water to produce wakes, different wakes, not reducible to the ship’s wake but caught up in it. We’re in the wake and of the wake…

g1(host) collaborators:

Lela Aisha Jones
Makeda Roney
Mandy Ringger
nia love
Nioka Workman
Nzingah Tyehemba
Orion Gordon
Rhonda Haynes
Saroya Corbett
Smitha Vishveshwara
Tara Sheena
Veleda Rohl
Zinnia Rohl-Gordon

Antoine Roney
Bella Stenvall
Benin Ford
Carolyn Mraz
Christina Sharpe
Coni Lewis-Lopez
Crystal Ruelas
Dave Elliot
Iquo Essien
james Hurt
Jesse Phillips-Fein
Jordan Young
Kojo Roney

Urban Bush Women

In Conversation: nia love and Benin Ford